It’s not uncommon to feel that there is more than just you inside your head. There seems to be a board of directors, at best, or a squabbling family, a mutinous crew, or a polarized congress up there, at worst. You may feel that someone sort of takes over, at inconvenient times. You hear a voice, maybe not the auditory kind, but a disparaging and derogatory point of view that makes you feel like crap. At the very least, you’re often divided, unable to make an important decision and follow through. Here’s what this looks like in real life: You wake up Monday morning motivated to exercise. Your Inner Athlete laces up running shoes and heads for the door. Your Inner Critic pipes up, saying you look ridiculous in those shorts. Your Caretaker reminds you the kids need breakfast and their lunches packed. Your Rebel says screw it all, sleep in. By 8 AM, you’ve held a town hall meeting you didn’t know you were having, complete with competing agendas and no clear resolution. Looking through the literature on this kind of thing, I find the phenomena given quite a range of names. Shamans throughout millennia have had the idea of spirit or demon possession. Plato spoke of three parts of the psyche: rational, appetitive, and spirited. St Augustine died with his old pagan personality alongside a Christian one. Freud called them the ego, the id and the superego; Jung, complexes and archetypes. To Federn, Berne, and John Watkins they were ego states. Contemporary therapists use terms like parts, voices, internal objects, and energy patterns. Most people these days are familiar with having an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other. Everyone is talking essentially about the same thing. Here, I will call them subpersonalities because that’s what my guide on the subject John Rowan in Subpersonalities: The People Inside Us (1990) called them. It’s my intention to go through his book and devote a series to what he can tell us about it. I’m doing this in preparation of my own book, Meeting the Voices in My Head: Searching for An Inner Adult, which I’m writing and hope to complete soon. There are several risks we run when we try to learn about subpersonalities. Some people resist the idea entirely, either because they don’t want to admit to something that seems crazy, or because they frame their problems differently. They might say, “I swore I would not take another drink, but then I had a relapse,” rather than recognizing two parts of themselves in conflict. The truth is, having subpersonalities doesn’t make you crazy any more than having multiple interests makes you scattered. Having voices in your head becomes a problem only when it significantly worsens your functioning. There are others who don’t admit they have subpersonalities because they don’t frame things that way. They might say, for instance, “I swore I would not take another drink, but then I had a relapse.” They don’t conceive of themselves as being split in two, one part swearing abstinence and the other part falling off the wagon. That’s fine, as long as their intent is to accept responsibility for their actions, but it may be useful if they played with the idea that there are two parts of them if they want a deeper understanding of how the relapse happened and what they can do to prevent it. This brings us to the third risk we run when we learn and claim to have subpersonalities. It’s necessary to take responsibility for our behavior. The alcoholic is quite right to say that he took that drink, even if it’s the devil in him that made him do it. There are some people who try to duck responsibility. The Hillside Strangler, Kenneth Bianchi, was one. He and his defense team tried to assert that the person who committed a series of heinous murders was not the same person who was accused of the crime. This defense was not successful, so let it be said that having subpersonalities does not absolve you of any crime. Here’s the fourth risk we run when we grapple with subpersonalities. On one hand, we need to reify the subpersonalities, and embody them by personifying them. On the other hand, we don’t want to take them so seriously that we begin to believe they’re real. We’re not talking about actual little people inside us. Subpersonalities are fluid and erratic processes that are so difficult to grapple with as processes that it’s useful to pretend they’re people. They are a useful fiction. The fifth risk is that in talking about subpersonalities we might be seen to be talking about multiple personality disorder, as it used to be known, or dissociative identity disorder (DID), as it is called now. It’s good they made the name change, for that clears up some of the confusion. They changed the name because having more than one personality is not, in itself, pathological, but can actually be quite useful, as we will see. Having mentioned the risks of studying subpersonalities, why do I do it and why do I invite you to come along? Some of you may say because they’re there. To others, I can only say that if you experience your own subpersonalities, you might better learn what makes them tick before everything devolves into chaos. In the next section, I will describe how subpersonalities are experienced by ordinary, well-functioning people in the natural world. You're currently a free subscriber to The Reflective Eclectic. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription.
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Monday, 6 October 2025
What Do I Do With the People Inside My Head?
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